The Story of Ed Watson

The following version of how Edgar Watson came to a violent end is based
on the publications Man in the Everglades, by Charlton W. Tebeau, and The
Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Tebeau's version
was in part related by C. S. "Ted" Smallwood. Watson's life is also
chronicled in noted novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen's Everglades
trilogy, Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone
by Bone. Ed Watson was a redhaired, blueeyed Scotsman who purchased a 40-acre,
shell-mound island, 17 miles south of Chokoloskee and began farming
this claim in 1892. He grew winter vegetables for the Key West New York produce
market,
and sugarcane, which he processed into syrup. By 1910 he had organized
the most successful farming operation in the Everglades.

Watson's notoriety isn't a result of his success as a farmer, however, but
comes from a life of violent acts that he either committed or, at least was
accused of committing. Originally from central Florida, he headed to the Midwest
after shooting a farm hand on his family's farm. Somewhere in Arkansas or Texas
he hooked up with the Belle Starr gang. At some point things went bad and he
is suspected of killing the famous lady outlaw. That was apparently followed
by an episode in Oregon a few years later where he killed a man in a dispute
and fled to Florida.

Next came another killing in Arcadia, Florida, a throat cutting in Key West,
and suspicion of at least four other murders. Things came to a head in the
summer of 1910 when a series of murders occurred at the Watson Farm. Although
Watson laid the blame on another man, suspicions were strong. Some versions
say Watson was long in the practice of hiring drifters who had wandered to
this remote land to work on his farm. Then when it came time to pay their wages,
he killed them instead.

The hurricane of 1910 interfered with an official investigation of the murders.
A few days later, when Watson pulled his boat up to the docks at Ted Smallwood's
Store he was confronted by an armed group of citizens. When asked to put down
his gun, he refused and either shot or attempted to shoot into the crowd. (Some
versions say he fired his shotgun but the shells were wet from the hurricane
and they didn't fire.)